But both speak clearly about the power of a few finely honed moments on the internet to motivate the extremists among us. More than 10,000 Americans found their hajj in a journey to the Walker Art Center August 30 where they made real their virtual communion over those cute kitty videos they click with compulsion on the web. Just 13 days later, another mob manifested its own internet-inspired crusade when angry protestors stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, enraged over the movie trailer for a Mohammed insult film.

Two very different events, and it’s fair to say one was terribly tragic while the other was simply stupid. But the word “fanatic” applies to the participants in each case.

If you drop the rhetoric, and try hard to see these things through the eyes of whichever culture is not yours, you might notice that the only real difference is that people in the Middle East practice Islam while Americans are more likely to worship at the church of irony. Within all congregations – and let’s expand that to any faith where adherents have the means, clout and determination to take their actions to the edge – there are things to be proud of and things that ought to embarrass us.

In between, films have changed the course of history. Director Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” which documented the 1934 Nazi Party convention, turned Hitler into a hero with a million soldiers at his call. His enemies returned fire, armed by the might of the big movie studios that ruled the day. Alford Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent,” about a U.S. journalist who uncovers a pro-German spy ring, was meant expose this country to the plight of its allies. William Wyler’s “Mrs. Miniver,” following a war weary mum in the English countryside, won six Oscars and the sympathies of an America just diving into the European conflict.

More than that, films can rewrite our personal histories. The 2004, anti-fast food “Super Size Me” may have inspired more than one person to drive past, rather than through, McDonald’s. The sharkfest “Jaws” was a boon for tourism—in the mountains.

This summer, the violent “Batman” movie franchise triggered acts of a different sort when a gunman, his hair dyed like the films’ “Joker” character shot 70 innocent people at a Colorado screening. Twelve died, three times the victims of the movie-inspired killings in Libya.

It used to be a long way from the Rocky Mountains to the Sahara Desert, but not anymore. It was much easier to see the differences between reactionary movements around the globe before the internet brought them all to the same tiny, iPhone screen. Now, the trouble comes in trying to separate them.

These days we prefer our video to round out at 120 seconds and to control its distribution by tapping a few buttons on YouTube. This act is easy and it is unstoppable. The Hosni Mubarak regime couldn’t shut down internet truth telling when its life depended on it, and even China, a master of high-tech censorship, can’t keep anti-government bloggers from having their say.

Official repression has been no more effective in regulating web content than Facebook’s “terms of service” guidelines. Offensive words and images find their digital venues. There will always be a WikiLeaks to publish secret documents, always hacking enterprises like Anonymous shutting things down, putting things up.

Censorship is dicey and known to prevent access to ideas both dangerous and desirable. The same language filters that could block anti-gay blasts on your home computer might also have screened out the anti-bullying “It Gets Better” videos, and they changed the lives of countless gay teens.

The world is altered easily and quickly now. MTV learned it could move an entire marketplace with just a few minutes of song and dance and since then, the short and choppy message has prevailed. A 30-second television commercial has become so valuable corporations will pay $4 million to show it at the right moment.

Video doesn’t have to be good to stir things up. The movie at the heart of last week’s violence may be the worst film of all time, bad acting, terrible directing, cheap sets.

But its trailer, though 14 minutes long, is edited with care in that way that makes trailers effective. High point. Cut. High Point. Cut. High Point. A good trailer famously sold “Citizen Kane” to the masses, but also “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” They can be a dark art.

As we’ve learned the hard way, manipulation isn’t bound by subject matter, or geography, or in the case of world turned mad by moving images, by quality. A grainy cat film, a crappy movie about a fine religion, they both speed up our heartbeats. It’s all the same.

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